Pirates rejoice: EZTV already returns after Swedish police raid

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

It has been nearly two weeks since copyright owners forever banished several wicked torrent sites from the internet — or so they would like to think. The action taken by Swedish police was aimed at shutting down The Pirate Bay, but several other notable torrent trackers were caught in the crossfire. EZTV was offline following the raid, but it’s back online today and again listing new copyright infringing material.

EZTV.it is one of the largest TV-focused torrent trackers on the internet, but it hasn’t drawn the ire of Hollywood like The Pirate Bay. EZTV simply had the misfortune of being hosted in the same Nacka, Sweden data center that housed The Pirate Bay’s load-balancing server. It was collateral damage, not that copyright owners minded much.

Unlike The Pirate Bay, EZTV actually relied on data stored on the servers in Nacka. For TPB, that location simply routed traffic to the actual servers scattered around the world. Luckily, the EZTV crew was able to recover a few servers with data backups, allowing proxies to continue working. Now the full site is back up with new torrent listings, and it has even kept its original domain.

EZTV isn’t simply a Pirate Bay alternative that specializes in TV shows. The staff actually curate the list of shows and post the approved releases for seeding. There might only be a dozen torrents posted per day, but they’re all properly labeled and categorized. By comparison, The Pirate Bay is the Wild West of torrents. This is not to imply you should go infringe copyrights, but EZTV is a thing that exists, and it has an interesting approach.

The Pirate Bay is still offline as of now, but the domain is starting to show signs of life. The page has an animated pirate flag, the iconic ship logo, and what appears to be a hydra in the background. I suspect this raid will turn out to solve none of Hollywood’s piracy woes.